Thursday, March 25, 2010

Cauleen was exhausted. She squeezed her pillow and rested her head into it. Pushing through the din of her Ipod should could hear a voice, " Mr. Entewata, please report to the courtesy phone at gate 7. Mr. Entewata." Cauleen pushed her deeper into the pillow. She sure was cozy. She loved being cozy. She thought about how Mike and her had laid on the bed and watched Dirty Dancing. She had been about as happy as she could ever be. They had made out earlier in the evening and now the good part had come where they just rocked back and forth and spooned. Mike was a good guy. She could probably see herself getting married to him. He seemed ready. His father was a pediatrician and he was studying politics. He had nice friends and he probably wouldn't go bald. And he had felt so nice when they just laid on that bed. All warm. She reached up and tightened the scrunchy in her hair so it pulled her hair back and then, again, pushed her head into her pillow. Below her pillow she could see her feet in her pink slippers. The slippers poked out from beneath her flannel pajama bottoms. And on top she wore her favorite Banana Republic navy blue sweatshirt. It covered her body like a wool blanket. A wool blanket with sleeves. Perfection. She rocked back and forth in her seat and sucked on the straw of her diet coke. She loved diet coke. It was the perfect drink. Carbonated, icey, and like coke, but diet. It was just a bit less than coke but still pleasurable. She wiggled her toes. Her circulation was terrible. The air conditioning in the airport was certainly no help but even at home, her feet were so cold. She had two pairs of socks on and still, she was forced to wiggle. "Mr. Entewata, please report to the courtesy phone at gate 7"

Friday, March 19, 2010

Jack was exhausted. He sat on the stage, under the heat of the blinding lights, trying his best to put on a good public face. But it was too hard. And come to think of it, he didn't care. What did he have to lose anyway? He looked over at his interviewer with teeth as bright as the lights, pale blue Italian blazer, and presidential hair... out of what womb are these men born? The interviewer was sharp, with edges that glistened, and a criss-crossing style that made mince-meat of Jack's empathetic groans. He knew they were killing him but he submitted like a Buddha fat from the harvest. Let them have their fun. I have exploded thousands of times above the horn rimmed glasses of the milk fed, letting my embers shower down over the picnic blankets and into the wet wine mouths of heated up high schoolers. I have made Americans in Iowa croon for the somnambulist sounds of Mizzipi and the walking dead of New York give credence to that ineffable garden out West. I gave them my years and I want nothing in return. What was, is now is, and that my friends..... is the best I'm gonna give ya. He skooched back in his chair and let the murmuring of the interviewer continue.

"Are a significant number of Americans precisely at an age when we enunciated the great society..."

That voice rattled in his head like a hangover. The shark was talking about Americans, hippies, this younger generation that moved along the streets of San Francisco with their placards, and their rights, and their demands. Communists. Most of em. But good kids. They want a just society and who can blame em? But they all have those peevish wimps leading them on, like Lawrence. Ironic really. The tight wads leading the flock and the world putting us together in a hot cross bun. A delicious bun. Maybe it was the great societies food? Paw! He laughed out loud. "No great society!" he guffawed to the shark.

"ie. the society that was actually going to produce politics as well as everything..."

Jack blurts out" As far as I'm concerned," but the shark cuts him off.

"are they disillusioned and does this have to do with the growth of the hippie movement?"

Disillusioned? Of course they are. Everyone is disillusioned. That's being an American. Sad and naff in the dew. Jack went on,

"In the first place, I think the Vietnameese war is nothing but a plot between the north Vietnamese and the south Vietnamese who are cousins to get jeeps in the country." He threw his hand up in the hair. Let them eat that bun. Lawrence. The audience laughed uncomfortably. Man, he was drunk. He knew his joke had a mean spirit in it and well, he felt mean. What was he doing up here anyway? He had written it all down. The words are there.

Sometimes, you just can't get them what they want. Sometimes, you know, you have to work. The spirit of America isn't there for you on a tv tray. You have to put some miles under your shoes, feel the rough skin of the the great lump between Cheyenne and Normal, and let the cold wind blowing from the back of a pick-up truck envelope you. There is a sweetness out there like that on a drunkards lips. Taste it if you can.

Thursday, March 18, 2010

Melinda was tired. She sat down at the bar and stared at the golf game on the television. What do these guys do once they retire, joked her husband. Golf was from Scotland like her. She had told the young couple just that very thing only a few minutes ago. She missed her cat. He had such personality. He had a meow for every mood. In the morning it was more like mearoww and in the evening it got more sweet like meeeeoow. She had only had him for a year and she already considered him like family. I mean, who has a cat like this? She knew just how to pick him up. One motion with your arm. Up and onto your shoulder. He was black with white paws. Like he has a tuxedo on!

She was drinking scotch and soda and Edgar was absorbed in the game. She looked over at the young couple that was playing darts. Darts were invented in Britain you know. People there have dart boards in their own rooms with the backs of their doors covered in holes. It’s like swiss cheese but of wood. She told the young couple her knowledge about darts. She liked the way her white shawl sort of radiated in the peculiar black light shining at 3:30 in the afternoon on a Sunday. She felt elegant but at the same time, sort of peppy. Fun. You know. Tim, the bartender, was telling a story about almost kicking someone out because they were such knuckleheads. She liked the dog. It had long floppy ears like a lop eared rabbit. It had just been shaved for summer. You wouldn’t want to be a long haired dog like that would you? She put her face down by its mouth, and wrapped her hands around its soft, newly hair-cut, head. “You like your new hair cut don’t you? Don’t you?” She squished her face up real tight and smiled broadly into the dogs saggy face. She loved this. She always loves a good dog. Who doesn’t for Christ’s sake?

She got up from her chair and walked outside. The sky had begun to rain which let the humidity crack open a bit. Edgar would be coming out soon to smoke a butt. She sat on the plastic chair and lit up a Virginia Slim. Her fingernails rapped on the plastic covering of the outdoor tables. The young couple was still playing darts. She loved that dog, but she also loved her cats. Isn’t it great to smell that rain after it hits the ground?

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Terry was exhausted. It had been four days and all he had found was an eight year old who already lost an arm. Supplies were getting low and that scared him. The desiccated skyline loomed over him with the blinking caution light pulsing obsessively on the corner. Shattered windows and tipped over garbage cans surrounded his lumbering steps as he made his way back to the hang out space. Such tedium. He would eat and then go back to the room where the other bald ones would just huddle together like bats in a cave. He made his way back to his spot and felt the pulse of the other sweaty bodies next to him. It was like a night club without music. Just a dank sweaty closet in an abandoned bottling plant. He scooched into position and began to undulate his body as well. He gyrated as his bald head bounced back and forth. His mouth opened slightly and he began, with zen like attunement, to moan.

The next evening arrived. He was hungry. His right leg ached from sliding along the floor as he walked. His feet suffered from the numerous calluses he had built up since he had been bitten at the Exxon station three weeks back. Along with the other baldies, he made his way out of the bottling plant and out onto the streets. He headed north toward the suburbs. He liked them. It took an incredibly long time to get there, but he enjoyed the feel of strip malls, cul de sacs and the wide streets. Cities were too dense. Plus, suburbs had meat.

The meat would tend to stay there. They thought of it more like home and if you listened carefully, you could hear sobbing in the parks and playgrounds. You could hear the banging of nails as they still tried to keep you out. Terry would take the freeway to get there. He was just a slow moving car really. If he wasn’t able to make it back before dawn, there were plenty of hang out spaces for the baldies. One was in the back storage area of a CostCo. He liked that one because it smelled like cardboard. There was also the super popular one at the cinemas, but he hated that because the rooms were on a gradient which hurt his bad leg. Plus, when the hang out spaces were popular, he tended to have the unfortunately luck of undulating next to extremely hairy sweaty baldies that took up too much space (both physically and psychologically).

He exited off the freeway into a quiet suburb. The grassy side of the off ramp greeted him. The vines just making their way up the stop signs. One day, he thought, these signs will be covered in vines. One day, after the meat runs out, we will live in a garden again. He didn’t eat vegetables but he wanted to. He lumbered past the Dunken Donuts, and the Taco Bell, past the Walgreens, and the Wells Fargo Bank. He made his way down a side street where could hear the faint sounds of nails pounding into wood. There was fear there. He began his moaning and pushed on coming closer to the sky blue Victorian house with the Ford Bronco parked out front. The curtain abruptly moved as he watched a four by eight sheet of plywood go up suddenly in front of the window. Muffled screams could be heard as he made his way across the front lawn. I hope this works out, he thought as he tried to punch threw the plywood.

His arms were tired and his punches hardly made a dent. The meat sat safely inside. He made his way toward the back yard hoping they had left the back door open but no such luck. The house was secured. He spotted a tabbie cat darting into the neighbor’s yard. They were much too fast for him. The sky was turning light blue and he realized he would be making his way to the Clearview Cinema to undulate. He turned around and headed back.

Monday, March 15, 2010

Kronar was exhausted. His calves ached from the two day climb up the steppes to the encampment. His shoulders burned from carrying the kill of half a dozen hares and an elk hide. It had been a good hunt, but soon enough, he would be back out. Food never seems to last.

He reached the clearing before dawn and his eyes rested on the circle of his tribe cast about on the hard dirt floor. Scattered about like cedar sticks, their bodies rested. Their long brown hair hung over their heads like a dense thicket and the glimmer of their rings and hairpieces reflected the slight glow of the crescent moon sinking along the horizon. They were a wealthy tribe replete with treasures from the lost sea to the edge of the empire. He looked down at his thumb ring. A panther’s claw with a ruby in the center showed him to be king. Morger slept with his hand clasped resolutely on his blade. Magel curled up like a ball at the outer edge of the tribe. Misel, the night’s watch, strode up to him slightly embarrassed that he had, yet again, not heard Kronar’s ascent. He shook his head and waved a finger at Kronar with a slight smile on his lips. Kronar threw him a plum he had procured in the valley and then set down in the middle of the circle for a few hours rest.

His eyes had hardly closed before they were open again to the sound of bodies shuffling. The crisp wet of dawn lingered over his body hair and the smell of morning entered his nose. He got up, feeling his bones crack into place, and dusted himself off. He walked over to Magel and nudged her. She needed to prepare the food for the day as the tribe would certainly be hungry. She would need to get the women together on this. He walked over to Misel and helped him with the fire. There was a special trick to twisting the wood and he showed Misel as best as he could how to do it. It’s all in the wrist and then a steady rhythm. In no time, he had smoke then spark then fire. The leaves and twigs burst into flames. In no time, the smell of smoke would have the entire tribe getting to work.

The men got up and inspected Kronar’s catch that the women laid out along the rope line. Yes, it had been good. The women proceeded to head out toward the river for the cleaning. The men gathered their rucksacks to forage some roots. The magic elder still slumbered under a large bush at the edge of the circle. His snores still ringing loudly with the only other sound being made, that of the crackling fire. Kronar was eager to mate. He grabbed Magel from the women group and led her to the center of the circle. He took her and she let him in as the smoke swirled around them. The magic elders snores blended in with the Magel’s heavy breathing. He rolled over and stared into the clouds. Dinner would be soon.

It began when we were an I. Back when the plenty were the spare. When the rain was but a drop. And so it shall be told.

I would wake up at the end of the day. This was an improvement as it used to be that I would wake up on the shuttle watching the lights of the traffic makes some celestial pattern. My head would be nodding back and forth and suddenly, I was awake. Time went on and my ability to not know where and what was going on improved to the point where I actually made it all the way through work and didn’t wake up till the shuttle was on its way back to my precinct. It was a sullen feeling no coffee nor tea could cure. It’s strange really. The routine of my life was like an autistic kid plunking on one string on an out of tune guitar all day. Plunk, plunk, plunk, plunk. It is a song you wouldn’t listen to. Something in the genre of a faucet you can’t fix or the snoring of an elderly man on an airplane.

When life is lived in this truly burned out state, you can play with time in a strange way. For example, as opposed to running in a linear line, you could secretly hopscotch through life. Just kind of bounce around. Each moment you make a pot of coffee is connected to the next moment you make coffee. Each moment you get heart burn is connected to the next moment you have heart burn. Each time you have macaroni and cheese is just one long yellow meal of mac-n-cheese. That morning I was in the midst of one long moment of feeling like a turd. One loooong moment of it. But that day, so it turns out, was special.

A new computer program did it really. I was in the far wing making my calls and checking the G.P.S. when I got word that an agent would be introducing new protocol. I was skeptical. Strangely, I was somehow deeply defensive about the naturally moribund system already in place. More new systems that would confuse the parolees and me making more paperwork for someone to feel important. This business (and it really is a business) is just too corrupt and I don’t even care. I will call it what it is, but I don’t particularly feel bad about it either. It is corrupt. But corruption, my friend, is just gods little way of reminding us that most people want to win. Not me. I lost track of the game a long time ago. So the agent showed up. Despite the look of consternation on my face I must admit feeling a pang of relief. My eyes hurt from staring at the computer too long. My legs felt that familiar end of the day atrophy sensation.

He introduced us to a new program for monitoring parolees. It was called I-Watch and as far as I could tell, that was what it was meant to do. You could simply watch. A modified tool for people whose job it is to look at people. I am a guard by the way. I protect you from them I guess. That is the thing with new programs. They always have some fancy name for something really obvious. I did programming back before I got into this and even worked in the field for a while. I just got laid off because, I kind of stopped caring. In a job like that you have to care even if just a little. So anyway, this obvious program was to allow you to see from the perspective of the parolee. Its purpose was to simplify our checks. We could at any moment know exactly what they were doing and we could always wear these clumsy microphones to talk to the parolee. Simple.

They then read a long list of what were appropriate questions, when it was appropriate to talk, on and on with an even longer and more tedious list of ethical responsibilities. It was one of those moments where in essence they are saying, we just invented an even more invasive technology, but will try to feel less insidious about it by reading a long list of appropriate behaviors that one should, but ultimately not, use. But fine. That is how it is. This new system would replace the calls. It was an obvious improvement. I realized I would no longer be staring at that map of Philadelphia any more. It was almost a part of me. I kissed that part good-bye.

And so I began to be the beta-tester for I-Watch. Initially it really wasn’t that different than making phone calls and watching a map. I would check in with the observant, see them at the quarantine center sitting at a computer doing nothing and would click out. Wasn’t much to talk about really. What would you say? So, are you sitting at your computer? The answer was obviously yes. Although there is something funny about watching someone on a computer in that I would be using a computer to watch someone looking at a computer. We could almost skip one of us or something. Anyway, so I would just click around. Of the fifteen observants I had under my watch, only one of them really did anything worth watching. That was Simon. What made him sort of different and worthwhile was that he would actually use his eyes. He noticed things. Hairline cracks in the sidewalks. Receipts in the gutters. The purses women tucked under their arms. The backs of people’s heads on the train. The flutter of leaves as a wind picked up. As tedious as that all sounds, I found watching the world through his eyes enjoyable. It passed the time.

As the days went on, I found myself increasingly on Simon’s page. Just sitting there. I would start by an early morning scan of the rest and then sort of relax with Simon. It was like cable but a bit different. For one thing, I could talk to him. Not that I did all that much. Not in the beginning. I would just let him know I was there. His cell was humble by most standards. He had these great RESISTANCE posters on the wall from the overthrow that blazed with strident reds and bold letters. He had some African sculptures he had made, a standard single bed with a grey cotton blanket and a bunch of books on horticulture he kept on a shelf. He had a routine as well. He would tie his shoes backwards. Well at least backwards from how I tie mine. He always placed his toothbrush with a clink on the sink. Dink. It was like the timpani in his day. Dink. He always downed his milk in the cafeteria in one motion. Just gone. His day work was a grounds landscaping. Talk about routine. I would watch glassy eyed as he would pull weeds up one after the other. The camera wasn’t perfect resolution and when he would really pick up speed the screen would turn into a swirling ocean of green. Just a blur of methodical movement. Woosh woosh woosh. I enjoyed that. I could see his hands turning up the earth and the roots poking out. You could almost smell it. I would sometimes say to him, you’re working too hard or help him out if I saw him miss something. He appreciated that and well, we began to be friends.

One afternoon, Simon took us on a walk. I had been talking to him about how he needed to mix up his rest-day. He always went to this far corner of this park and would just stare at the sky like he was stoned. But he wasn’t. I would know of course. And I enjoyed staring at that sky for a while. The sun would play dizzying tricks on the clouds and occasionally flocks of birds would make hypnotic specs as they flew by in formation. It was picturesque to say the least. After the first two hours of trying to stay tuned to his zen like meditation I would get fidgety and scroll through the other observants. One of the others, Fran, would avidly do crosswords and I would try to keep up with him. But it wasn’t easy really. I had to enjoy the way he scribbled out the clues as he went along. Frenetic swirling scratches in blue pen. Another observant, Midge, would spend most of his day looking at porn, which, well, is technically against the rules, but I let it slide, because, I kind of liked looking at it too. So, there were some distractions while Simon stared out at the sky. But this afternoon I spoke to Simon and asked if he wouldn’t mind doing something else. He was always very gentle and said he would happily. What would I like to do?

I asked if he wouldn’t mind showing me the people of the quarantine home. Who he liked. Who he didn’t. It would be a sort of human safari with my observant guide. This is Miguel. You will notice his bellbottom jeans, his dirty flannel shirt, his swagger to the left, the smoke stains on his fingers. He balls his fists up when he walks and he likes his shirts to show off the few hairs on his chest. His wallet hangs just above his back pocket with the black leather worn down in the corner. He looks like a tough guy because, well, he is a tough guy. This is Nicholas. He’s constantly discussing Cajun food. He has a slightly reddish beard and bad teeth. His left incisor is sort of yellower than the others. He has tired eyes. The kind that don’t ever seem to wake up. You can hear the southern twang in his voice and his evident pleasure with himself. I would look them over and Simon would whisper his narratives to me. He had a funny way of describing folks. Like me, he didn’t really have much of an opinion of people, good or bad. But he did enjoy describing them. I sometimes would have to tell him to be quiet so I could try to make my own opinion about an inmate. At the end of day, Simon went back to his cell. As he untied his shoes, he asked me if I wouldn’t mind upgrading his quarantine cell. Consider it a tour guide fee. It was perfectly reasonable and I set it up.

And so began that fateful dynamic.

Trading is what we called it. I get his body for a while and I do him favors. I figure of fifteen observants, I could at least have one target of leniency. It was a reasonable tit for tat. It was like getting cable for free without a narrative. I liked to think it was a reality television show without a story. It was just a series of obscure moments connected by a body in space. I would have Simon stare into the dishwasher with the safety door open so I could see the streams of water pour off the plates. Watch the sausage bits cling resiliently to the porcelain before tumbling effortlessly down toward the drainage bin. I was on a water kick for a while. We would go to the pool together and I could watch everyone’s slow limbs treading like they were conducting an aquatic symphony. Watch the crystal white water slap up against the side of the pool. Watch the splash glisten in the fluorescent light as the body of a speedo-wearing child bisects the undulating horizon. Head to a lake, get a canoe, put my head over the side of the boat and just watch the world move below. A rotoscope of smoothed over boulders, pebbles, tadpoles, ripples. A landscape below the landscape with an abundance of glittering golden hues. In return, lets say, Simon’s cell began to look possibly a little too upgraded.

I would go home after work thinking about everything I had seen that day. I would dream of the hubbub and the movement of the men down the narrow hallways. The jiggling of the perspective. The fuzzy edges of the frame. The hypnotic bounce of the camera as it took in a world that was supposedly out there existing. Radiating. I saw myself sitting in that canoe again. My fingers holding onto the metallic boats edge. My hair blowing in that dusk wind. I could feel my index finger on the threads of his shoelaces, tying them up backwards, making perfect bows. I rocked back and forth on that lake and watched the moon push past the sky and plunge down to the earth and buoy back the light.

It shouldn’t have surprised me that the word got out. Fortunately, it was Fran since, well, he was one of the more interesting of the rest. In essence, whether Simon told him or Fran figured out I don’t know, word got out that I was trading favors. I found out when Simon broached the subject with me as he woke up in the morning. Fran didn’t want to rat me out so much as wanted in. He wanted in on the trading. Rat me out or not, I had to comply. I was in a precarious situation. I liked Simon so much, but at the same time, there was an inflation going on with the trading. How much more could I provide without jeopardizing my situation?

I was heading down this path and I knew it was leading toward me getting fired. The same thing happened at my software job. I just began playing solitaire on the computer screen everyday. Watching the brilliant red diamonds lay out on top of the black hole clubs and spades. Often my eyes would unfocus and they were just a blur of stacked ruins. A digital tombstone for my hair’s breath of a life. I barely played. I just enjoyed killing time with a sort of passive aggression bordering on nihilism. Over and over the cards piled up on the screen. Whether I won or lost, I would just keep playing. I entered a wormhole of total dissolution and it felt fine. It wasn’t long after that I lost my job.

In this case, it was the same aggression but it wasn’t nihilism. It was like a dream so vivid you didn’t want to wake. You had to keep sleeping. Hitting snooze over and over as the mood of your slumber overwhelmed you. After considering it, I figured I would use each observant for a different set of desires. Simon would be for watching. Fran for doing. I started off so rudimentary. Laundry. Post office. I then graduated to much better tasks like visiting places I used to go. I decided to pay my niece Chloe a visit. She was my screwed up sister’s daughter who somehow managed to be a genius. For reasons I was never clear on, she liked me. She would make me stupid greeting cards when I would visit her that was so adorable. Like a drawing of ant carrying a leaf with a heading saying, “Small is big.” I have no idea what she talks about but that is part of her charm. So anyway, she was a crossing guard at her school and I just wanted Fran to have her walk him across the street. As part of her duties, she wore a big yellow plastic hat and a silver badge pinned to her shirt. That day, she was wearing a white skirt with snoopy on it and a bandaid on her right knee. Fran waited for the traffic and looked her over for me. She was amazing. I had this urge to tell Fran to pick her up and hug her, but thank God I refrained. That would have been a total disaster. Instead, he calmly walked across the street as she waded out into the road and blew her whistle for him to pass. There she was. Just out there doing her thing. Alone and on auto pilot for a moment in time. I felt a pang of wonderment and fear as I pictured her orchestrating this task in the cold wilderness of this world. How can something so small feel so whimsical and safe in this dread hole of a planet? I admit it was an odd request for Fran to visit Chloe so I really needed to pay him off. He found himself the proud owner of a year’s package of an extra free day per week. But who is kidding whom? A free day for Fran is a free day for me.

I must admit a fear that tickled the back of my throat as we pushed further and further into this symbiotic existence. My body was falling away and I would vacillate between panic and euphoria. I could sense on the horizon something like an afterlife on earth full of religious wonder. Not that I was religious by any stretch, but that I was strangely heading into untrammeled territory. I was an explorer of a psychological terrain heretofore unknown. I stook on a vista looking over a valley so vast and full of new fruits and vegetables, my mouth watered to descend and taste them. I really was on the cusp of something extraordinary. I could feel its importance as I delved deeper. There just wasn’t any stopping.

As time passed, we developed many maneuvers together to make this thing work. Fran and Simon would partner up on projects as I moved deftly between them giving them instructions. We even attempted basketball where I would direct them against other players. Admittedly, basketball was a clunky endeavor but I enjoyed trying it. Video games with people. It felt great. Contrary to every other experience in my life, this one got more interesting the longer I did it. I did occasionally have a desire to use them in what might be considered unethical ways. While I might have them both look at a hot girl from multiple vantage points, I stopped myself from ever acting on anything. These guys were my friends. I didn’t want to get them in trouble. But I could sense the temptation. My distance made my actions sort of, well, fake. I was one step away from moral responsibility. Maybe one step is all it takes. Would god consider this cheating?

But of course good things can not last forever and especially in a crappy job/life like mine. Word came down that I was being reprimanded for giving out too many benefits to the observants. My reward structure (otherwise known to me as my currency) was finally catching the attention of the higher ups. I had to scale back. This news wasn’t popular over in surveillance land, as I had to tell Simon and Fran that frankly the well was dry. They grumbled and Fran and Simon even went so far as to go on strike, refusing to let me tell them what to do. I would look through their eyes and find myself back on crosswords and shoelaces. “Oh no,” I thought. “What a total mess.” I couldn’t go back. Not to that dreary life of semi-living monotony.

I can’t say for sure who thought of it first. It was probably all of us at the same time, but the proposition was put forth that maybe, I could reverse the engineering. Maybe I could trade myself, just as they did? It would require sneaking them some gear but it was all rather simple in and of itself. A basic remote video camera was really all it required. The proposition was that I would trade myself after work and they would trade themselves during. Tit for tat. Maybe I was the tat. Who can say? So this got off to a clunky start. I found myself somewhat embarrassed following their orders as I made my way home on the train. When I would look through Simon’s eyes, he would look at the most amazing things. I, on the other hand, found myself desperate to be an interesting host. Trying to gain that luster of curiosity that seemed to emanate from Simon. Instead, they would use me to do the most banal of daily tasks like delivering goods and doing laundry. I really was a bit of a menial whore, but I acquiesced. This relationship would inevitably evolve.

In those last months, the world of myself, changed in crazy ways. I would have Fran’s dreams and he would have mine. I would hear him cough and cover my mouth. I would see a girl and he would turn his head. We used to have to tell each other with words, but rapidly, we began to develop silent codes. Simple typed instructions like “left” “smile” joy” “pain” would be enough to get the reaction we needed. We were becoming each other and at first I was scared. I was losing track of me. Not only was I losing track of me, but I liked the others more. I wanted out. I wanted another body and I had gained two. I realized that I didn’t need to worry whether Simon was looking at things or I was. Either way, we saw the same thing. We were looking. We were doing things. We were dreaming. It was just these bodies that separated us. Our minds were a dreamy sweet unit. These were my last thoughts. They fell away and I awoke descending into that valley, eating new fruits and vegetables that mankind will taste in abundance soon.

We became a squadron, a team. We learned to compromise in order to make the totality of who we were more potent. The sum of our actions out measured the individual parts in quantities too vast to count. It was an inevitability that was with us all along but only obvious in retrospect. We would look back at the past as thought it was a lost era in time. An era when we had been under a spell of mythic specific bodies. It was an era that was strangely claustrophobic. Now, we were together. Our wings could expand. We had agreed that the job holder would have to quit the job as the network for controlling this didn’t even require us being there. We could make this work anywhere, and why limit ourselves by having a part stuck in one place? We needed to expand and be constantly in mutual trading. We would work simultaneously and escape the banality of shifting between the parts. We became so versed in communications that we acted as one unit. One motion. One body. So the guard job was dropped and we were able to evade the parole by having parts outside the legal jurisdiction.

We gained new members. Their integration into our communication systems took some time, but as we expanded more rapidly, we developed a portion of the team that dealt specifically with integration. While we originally began inside the confines of a parole condition, we rapidly integrated non-parole parts. Free people if you will. The quantities of pleasure grew exponentially as we shared our efforts toward a collective service. Our bodies and minds intertwined in a collective energy so profound, we all could only gasp at the heavenly world that opened up before us.

We expanded rapidly across the free world. We were acutely aware of how strange we must appear to those not integrated into our being. The word got out about a growing cult. That is how they initially thought of us. A cult. So funny. We made agreements to not display any type of behavior too different from the non-integrated. Quietly, however, we were rapidly developing a new language and culture that mystified us. It was critical that we appear to the non-integrated as well, something extremely useful. Something productive. It was the maximizing of their individual efforts that was the lure for them to be integrated. They were so funny in the way they naively accepted their autonomy. They resisted us in the most vengeful terrified ways. As though integration would take their soul away. What a strange world. But how could they know?

I surely didn’t. I suppose I was born somewhere in the first movement. Somewhere around the acceleration phase of forty parts. I am familiar with a hidden origin story where the penal system had forced observation components on individuals. It’s strange, but there was a time when no one was integrated. Just parts everywhere. It is an odd way to start and I can’t say for sure why I am alive. But I am. I am some sort of new being that terrifies the non-integrated like crazy. It bums me out, because I really don’t want to scare them. I realize they are potential parts of me, but I have grown ok with not completely expanding. Its hard staying alive. Some parts of me are so tired of working on the expansion components and other parts are exhausted from procreating new parts. It is like my bodies hurt. Nonetheless, I am excited and scared. The world is so new and as vast. I see it from hundreds of thousands of angles and its luminous magic sparkles bright. It’s like mysterious eyes of a fly. I see in a kaleidoscope that reaches across the world in three dimensions with dumping waterfalls, blowing grass, the whirring of fans, the leaking of faucets, and the benevolent sunsets that bless the skies at all times the world over. The planet’s crisp wonder only magnified and expanded in ways that take your breath away. I have sort of escaped time. More exactly, it has stretched to contain what I am. I am ever and I know I am new. It is true I have a beginning but not clear whither my end. I am not like anything the world has seen, but soon enough the world we see itself through its own precious eyes. They are mine.

I remember going to parades as a kid and never quite understanding what was going on. Every time I heard the family was heading out to see the parade, I equated the affair with the rare times I attended church. I felt that creepy uncomfortable feeling you get when you are participating in someone else’s meaningful experience. My family never had the fold out lawn chairs. For that matter, we never had any of the proper gear. No coolers. No sunscreen. No visors with sunglasses. We would hover in the back and I would long for some fried dough. Standing in bored bafflement on a hot summer day, I would listen to the marching band and think, “I hate this music. Who sits back and listens to a marching band?” The marching band reminded me of the high school football teams with their near fascist-like stampede; my supposed peers falling over themselves desperate to enact the grand high school, John Hughes film narrative. The marching band screamed a victorious battle cry for the great blonde beasts of high school power. I would see the Shriners driving around in the little cars buzzing around like little gnomes. Why am I standing on the sidelines? I did like their tiny fezzes propped up on their heads with their tassels wiggling around as they winked at the ladies. But I intuitively sensed this was some hangover from the great generation. A mobile display of the good old days when patriarchal old men gathered together in lodges, watched blue movies with cards, beer and hackneyed Masonic rituals.

What did this have to do with me? I couldn’t understand why my family would stand on the sidewalks of our town and wave at various city dignitaries (the mayor, and the head of city council, and the police chiefs) as they drove by in some convertible Cadillac with their angelic daughters sitting with them. My parents were broke. The city gave us nothing. Boy, this sure feels alienating. Who cares about these people? At the time (the time being when I was 14), I found my mother’s sage advice becoming a reality, “Son, the world is a lot like junior high school. Get used to it.” Our local parades only validated this haunting truism. The parade had been effective in making one thing clear: I was an outsider.

Then, much later, when I was 31, I had the opportunity to participate in a parade. I was volunteering for a small non-profit art space, which had been, for the first time, invited to participate in the local State Street Parade. We held meetings to discuss what our float would look like and came up with a pretty bad idea (I think it was a girl in her bed with haunted monsters jumping out of a closet), but we were all eager to wear monster costumes. As I gathered in the parking lot in our appointed section, I watched the local marching bands getting prepped. The band members’ eyes popping out with painful nervousness. The tuba player fussing with the straps around his bulging belly. I saw the sweet little girls with their batons and their parents excitedly tucking in their outfits. It felt like I was watching my town get all getting gussied up. We were in some back room of the city, intimately choreographing some collective project together. As I marched through the town in an Oscar the Grouch meets Sponge Bob costume, and waved at (and scared) children, threw candy, and attempted to be entertaining, I realized being in a parade was far better than watching one. So many of the towns people were in the parade, we joked that the whole city should join in and we would simply march past each other in an enormous circle parading and looking at each other. Being in the parade, I realized that what I found so gratifying was the simple emotion: look town, I am here. I exist.

If I take my small alienated feelings from my first parades, and then extend them to the gratifying emotions I gained in my monster costume 17 years later, a shimmering line of tension emerges that makes the political power of parades come to light. Moving from a familiar ritual of social alienation (the parade is there to confirm your position as loser) to the center of attention at the center of the city (the parade makes you a winner) is akin to a gateway to junior high heaven. The parade becomes the red carpet of social acceptance. Being in the parade is a statement on the social body that says, “I’m here and I’m part of the grand ‘we’.” Joining a parade, I can only guess, can be a sort of social graduation or urban baptism. From the doldrums of your undignified aberrant outsider position, the parade can jettison your tawdry life into the Pretty-in-Pink limelight. And such an experience clearly has attracted a bevy of ‘outsider’ parades. Gay Pride, Puerto Rican Day Parade, May Day Parade, Cinqo de Mayo, Take Back the Night, and Ku Klux Klan (what is the name of their parade, for that matter?) all represent communities and identities demanding a presence in the fabric of cultural and spatial life in a city. “We’re here! We’re Queer! Get used to it,” the Gay Pride mantra tellingly goes.

Gay Pride was once a parade of liberation. Born out of the Stonewall riots of 1969 in Greenwich Village, this anti-puritanical street festival originally possessed a more severe tone of revolution. The Stonewall Riots erupted when police raided a popular transsexual bar in the Greenwich Village frequented predominately by people of color. In fighting back the police, the legend of the Stonewall riots circulated with an urgent underlying appeal: we will no longer be silent. Originally, part of Gay Liberation Day, the parade which emerged a year after Stonewall retained a productive defiance in its assertion of not only existence for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual community, but more importantly for rights. In the 1980s, the parades shifted away from the term liberation and moved toward Gay Pride. As of the 21st century, the Gay Pride parades are a fixture of contemporary life whose radicalness is still felt, but at the same time feel somewhat different from a rhetoric of revolution or liberation. In fact, tellingly much debate has surfaced on whether or not the parades benefit from being a party of excess or one for rights. What a wonderful tension to wrestle with.

Just previous to the summer of love and its various counter positions, the French political avant-garde association the Situationists were invested in producing alternatives to the social control of the city. They believed that our behaviors and emotions were produced through the control mechanisms of capital (both in terms of visual culture and the design of the city) and they referred to the study of this phenomena as psychogeography. In reaction to the Surrealists position that the imagination derives from the subconscious, the Situationists radically posited that the subconscious was structured by the formation of the city. If one wanted to alter the subconscious, one had to alter their relationship to the city. One of their multiple methods for accomplishing such a profound task was an ambulatory stroll called the derivé. The derivé is simply a walk through the city following ones moods and desires, and in essence, resisting the utilitarian and capitalist structure that moves us through the city. It strikes me as odd that the Situationists never discussed parades. How large groups of individuals moving through space can re-structure the veritable cerebral cortex that is the city. For, clearly, if our relationship to the city is at the core of our self-image, large groups of people collectively dancing, jamming and rollicking through the two lane byways must surely be its ultimate expression. As men in leather buttless pants spank each other, moustached dikes stride sleeveless up main Street USA and towering transsexual gogo dancers smile to the sky, the city’s brain mutates. The IRA and Protestant Orange certainly understood such powers as they wrestled for power with parades through the streets of Belfast to confront and redefining cultural, political, and social territories. When Hitler organized the Third Reich to dramatically trounce the streets of Berlin in cavalcades of swastikas and knee high glistening black boots, he literally felt like the brain surgeon of the urban body.

Maybe the Situatinists didn’t write about parades, because parades require permits. They have to be sanctioned by the state and thus, in some way, are not a dangerous threat. Contrasted with the riot, the parade seems a little more prepped and condoned. The riot on the other hand, feels wild, feverish, aggressive and furious. Rather than casting streamers and chewing gum, the riot runs with guns and torches, smashing private property, igniting and upturning cars. The riot explodes as the disenfranchised crash against the urban body in a sudden and feverish jolt. How enjoyable to think that such raw emotion lurks behind the pageantry of Gay Pride, Puerto Rican Day Parade or May Day. The ghost of a riot haunts the parade. I like to think of the mayor of my town waving goodbye to whatever social upheaval gave birth to its beginning. During the Rose Parade in Pasadena, I can picture the community leaders waving goodbye to the memory of the Watts riots and Rodney King riots. The little hand of the mayor’s daughters turning, robotically, to cast away the memory of the viewers’ liberation like a magicians’ charm. Poof! Good-bye riot. Hello victory march!

It is true that some parades are made as the legitimating stamp of approval for the powerful. We’re here. Our streets. Get used to it. While others, are perpetually in the throws of resistance. The ghost of social tensions and historic trauma feed each parade as a social writing happens with each pace of the foot or revolution of the car wheel. The best of parades, take their ghosts, dress them up, and let them lead. The social unrest becomes the death march of a powerful exaltation affirming life, death, existence and social space. And no city in the United States is more comfortable and skilled in such use of public space as the post-Hurricane Katrina city of New Orleans.

I spent much of last year in this incredible, complicated and culturally dense city. Amongst the wreckage of a community in the throws of social and political turmoil and trauma, I found the robust reality expressed by Michal Bakhtin’s carnivalesque. The parade, in New Orleans, is what the freeway is to Los Angeles. It is the fabric of the city. Traveling precariously between life, death, happiness, and agony, these emotional sojourns meander through the humid streets of the Big Easy beckoning all in attendance to collectively make their own rules. Beads, glitter, horns, body fluids and floats continuously plaster the sidewalks. A buoyancy of the imagination infuses the city’s cartography with possibility. All emotions are re-invented as you march with thousands of New Orleanians to the up temp blasting of the brass bands and the spontaneous eruptions from the increasingly intoxicated crowd; people dancing in front yards, on top of fire hydrants, slapping a stop sign, and in the back of their cars. There is no audience. Everyone participates. The city is a stage.

Almost every weekend in New Orleans, a new neighborhood will throw a parade referred to as a second line. These day-long parades were organized, and many still are, by Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, a term used for the community organized social clubs that would band together to assist in funeral marches. The funeral feeds the march. Death is in the air. Like all things in New Orleans, everything is tempered with a deep understanding of tragedy. In these all day second lines, the social order is not only upturned, but one could go so far as to say that the social order is continuing to be defined. What happens in New Orleans is an ongoing dedication to a rule structure not in cahoots with capital or a traditional social order. As second lines maintain a regular schedule, one could say New Orleans runs on parades.

Unlike the clunky parades of my youth, New Orleanians don’t simply reflect their extant communities but use the parade to bring them to another level. The parade becomes a mobile collective space of becoming. The rules of the city are constantly up for grabs. The sidewalk is a dance floor. The porch is a bar-b-que pit. The street is a water slide. If the Situationists are correct, and the way we move through the city defines who we are, I want to be dancing on a fire hydrant and not waving from the sidelines. I want the memory of the riot to make those in power unsettled. I want the parade to unsettle the city. To give it the jitters. To make its waving hand shake, quake, and roll.

Melinda was tired. She sat down at the bar and stared at the golf game on the television. What do these guys do once they retire, joked her husband. Golf was from Scotland like her. She had told the young couple just that very thing only a few minutes ago. She missed her cat. He had such personality. He had a meow for every mood. In the morning it was more like mearoww and in the evening it got more sweet like meeeeoow. She had only had him for a year and she already considered him like family. I mean, who has a cat like this? She knew just how to pick him up. One motion with your arm. Up and onto your shoulder. He was black with white paws. Like he has a tuxedo on!

She was drinking scotch and soda and Edgar was absorbed in the game. She looked over at the young couple that was playing darts. Darts were invented in Britain you know. People there have dart boards in their own rooms with the backs of their doors covered in holes. It’s like swiss cheese but of wood. She told the young couple her knowledge about darts. She liked the way her white shawl sort of radiated in the peculiar black light shining at 3:30 in the afternoon on a Sunday. She felt elegant but at the same time, sort of peppy. Fun. You know. Tim, the bartender, was telling a story about almost kicking someone out because they were such knuckleheads. She liked the dog. It had long floppy ears like a lop eared rabbit. It had just been shaved for summer. You wouldn’t want to be a long haired dog like that would you? She put her face down by its mouth, and wrapped her hands around its soft, newly hair-cut, head. “You like your new hair cut don’t you? Don’t you?” She squished her face up real tight and smiled broadly into the dogs saggy face. She loved this. She always loves a good dog. Who doesn’t for Christ’s sake?

She got up from her chair and walked outside. The sky had begun to rain which let the humidity crack open a bit. Edgar would be coming out soon to smoke a butt. She sat on the plastic chair and lit up a Virginia Slim. Her fingernails rapped on the plastic covering of the outdoor tables. The young couple was still playing darts. She loved that dog, but she also loved her cats. Isn’t it great to smell that rain after it hits the ground?

Terry was exhausted. It had been four days and all he had found was an eight year old who already lost an arm. Supplies were getting low and that scared him. The desiccated skyline loomed over him with the blinking caution light pulsing obsessively on the corner. Shattered windows and tipped over garbage cans surrounded his lumbering steps as he made his way back to the hang out space. Such tedium. He would eat and then go back to the room where the other bald ones would just huddle together like bats in a cave. He made his way back to his spot and felt the pulse of the other sweaty bodies next to him. It was like a night club without music. Just a dank sweaty closet in an abandoned bottling plant. He scooched into position and began to undulate his body as well. He gyrated as his bald head bounced back and forth. His mouth opened slightly and he began, with zen like attunement, to moan.

The next evening arrived. He was hungry. His right leg ached from sliding along the floor as he walked. His feet suffered from the numerous calluses he had built up since he had been bitten at the Exxon station three weeks back. Along with the other baldies, he made his way out of the bottling plant and out onto the streets. He headed north toward the suburbs. He liked them. It took an incredibly long time to get there, but he enjoyed the feel of strip malls, cul de sacs and the wide streets. Cities were too dense. Plus, suburbs had meat.

The meat would tend to stay there. They thought of it more like home and if you listened carefully, you could hear sobbing in the parks and playgrounds. You could hear the banging of nails as they still tried to keep you out. Terry would take the freeway to get there. He was just a slow moving car really. If he wasn’t able to make it back before dawn, there were plenty of hang out spaces for the baldies. One was in the back storage area of a CostCo. He liked that one because it smelled like cardboard. There was also the super popular one at the cinemas, but he hated that because the rooms were on a gradient which hurt his bad leg. Plus, when the hang out spaces were popular, he tended to have the unfortunately luck of undulating next to extremely hairy sweaty baldies that took up too much space (both physically and psychologically).

He exited off the freeway into a quiet suburb. The grassy side of the off ramp greeted him. The vines just making their way up the stop signs. One day, he thought, these signs will be covered in vines. One day, after the meat runs out, we will live in a garden again. He didn’t eat vegetables but he wanted to. He lumbered past the Dunken Donuts, and the Taco Bell, past the Walgreens, and the Wells Fargo Bank. He made his way down a side street where could hear the faint sounds of nails pounding into wood. There was fear there. He began his moaning and pushed on coming closer to the sky blue Victorian house with the Ford Bronco parked out front. The curtain abruptly moved as he watched a four by eight sheet of plywood go up suddenly in front of the window. Muffled screams could be heard as he made his way across the front lawn. I hope this works out, he thought as he tried to punch threw the plywood.

His arms were tired and his punches hardly made a dent. The meat sat safely inside. He made his way toward the back yard hoping they had left the back door open but no such luck. The house was secured. He spotted a tabbie cat darting into the neighbor’s yard. They were much too fast for him. The sky was turning light blue and he realized he would be making his way to the Clearview Cinema to undulate. He turned around and headed back.

Kronar was exhausted. His calves ached from the two day climb up the steppes to the encampment. His shoulders burned from carrying the kill of half a dozen hares and an elk hide. It had been a good hunt, but soon enough, he would be back out. Food never seems to last.

He reached the clearing before dawn and his eyes rested on the circle of his tribe cast about on the hard dirt floor. Scattered about like cedar sticks, their bodies rested. Their long brown hair hung over their heads like a dense thicket and the glimmer of their rings and hairpieces reflected the slight glow of the crescent moon sinking along the horizon. They were a wealthy tribe replete with treasures from the lost sea to the edge of the empire. He looked down at his thumb ring. A panther’s claw with a ruby in the center showed him to be king. Morger slept with his hand clasped resolutely on his blade. Magel curled up like a ball at the outer edge of the tribe. Misel, the night’s watch, strode up to him slightly embarrassed that he had, yet again, not heard Kronar’s ascent. He shook his head and waved a finger at Kronar with a slight smile on his lips. Kronar threw him a plum he had procured in the valley and then set down in the middle of the circle for a few hours rest.

His eyes had hardly closed before they were open again to the sound of bodies shuffling. The crisp wet of dawn lingered over his body hair and the smell of morning entered his nose. He got up, feeling his bones crack into place, and dusted himself off. He walked over to Magel and nudged her. She needed to prepare the food for the day as the tribe would certainly be hungry. She would need to get the women together on this. He walked over to Misel and helped him with the fire. There was a special trick to twisting the wood and he showed Misel as best as he could how to do it. It’s all in the wrist and then a steady rhythm. In no time, he had smoke then spark then fire. The leaves and twigs burst into flames. In no time, the smell of smoke would have the entire tribe getting to work.

The men got up and inspected Kronar’s catch that the women laid out along the rope line. Yes, it had been good. The women proceeded to head out toward the river for the cleaning. The men gathered their rucksacks to forage some roots. The magic elder still slumbered under a large bush at the edge of the circle. His snores still ringing loudly with the only other sound being made, that of the crackling fire. Kronar was eager to mate. He grabbed Magel from the women group and led her to the center of the circle. He took her and she let him in as the smoke swirled around them. The magic elders snores blended in with the Magel’s heavy breathing. He rolled over and stared into the clouds. Dinner would be soon.

Strange really. I mentioned this thought to some folks at Creative Time recently while they were shoving ice cream cake in their mouths for my birthday lunch, and well, they seemed not at all interested in the profundity of this idea. What if, in fact, all these thoughts I think are so compelling are in fact, old hat for most. What if, I am simply fascinated by ideas that most people find rather common place? While it may certainly be true, this would mean that I possess a vastly inaccurate perception of the order of things. Nonetheless, to the thought.

So, evolution. Whatever survives, survives. Whatever dies, dies. This process moving across genetic, cultural, geographic, climatic and numerous other conditions forces a sort of logic that tells a kind of story of survival. This story of survival can in fact be told either through an evaluation of how those conditions have appeared in a certain body or conversely how the body gives testament to the history of these conditions. Of course, most of the time that the story of evolution is told, we tell it from a certain perverse tautalogy that takes what is given as inevitable. For example, one can say that a butterfly is a certain color because its bright color makes most predators think it is poisonous. It might lead one to think that the butterfly mutated for this purpose of survival but that is inaccurate. It was just that the brighter colored butterflies over time tended to survive more. That is to say, it is the process of death and procreation over time that produces this process called evolution.

Now, this example we follow because we can see, with our eyes, the color on the butterfly and thus gauge its mutations over time. We can follow in the historic record how various mutations over time have visibly shown up on the body of a butterfly. Through this record we are able to deduce not only something about the butterfly but also about its predators. The body of the butterfly becomes a record of conditions of survival over time.

So what about forms of survival we do not yet understand? Certainly we must admit a great humility in our ability to understand the world around us. Certainly many empirical phenomena remain yet to be detected. That is to say, there are things that are affecting us that we still do not understand nor furthermore know about. Wouldn't it stand to reason that those phenomena that we have yet to understand or maybe, have a limited understanding of such as time itself, nonetheless produce a certain historic record in the genetic and bodily record? We are not only evolving in ways we know, but ultimately, in ways we do not understand. It is this strange thought that I find deeply interesting and exciting that nonetheless failed to impress my Creative Time cohorts as we ate delicious chocolate ice cream cake.

About Nato Thompson

I work as a chief curator at a public art (I like to think cultural) organization called Creative Time. I tend to privilege projects that deal more directly with urgent social issues of our time (not because I am hell bent on political art, but I simply feel that the urgency of our times demands a more serious and radical form of cultural production). I was raised by loving hippie parents and had a wonderful smiling brother, Eli. I tend to use this blog for musings on subjects ranging from contemporary art, to political theories, to philosophical musings, to bad jokes, to sweet thoughts, to dreams. I would love for you to comment.